STAYING AFTER GIRLSCHOOL

STAYING AFTER GIRLSCHOOL

FEATURES

Richard Riegel

Girlschool members Kim McAuliffe and Gil Weston flash me quick smiles as we’re introduced in their road manager’s hotel room, and I’m relieved to note that both possess intact sets of choppers. All four Girlschool women have their mouths so resolutely stiffupperlip closed in the jacket and publicity photos for their new Play Dirty that I had half feared that they’d succumbed to the dread English Rockers Teeth Syndrome that’s felled so many of their male colleagues.

It always starts innocently enough—at age six or seven, these neophyte Brit bombers begin to cadge a few pence from their milk money each week to buy Kerrang! and Sounds, and by the time they’re worldrenowned guitar heroes at 19, they’ve missed out on so much calcium that the Polident rep is chasing .them from gig to gig for anendorsement. Some, like Motorhead’s everlovin’ Lemmy, go on to even greater heights of postdental gum joy.

But not for Girlschool are Lemmy’s long not-a-tooth-in-his-head(banger) days and nights, even if he was their early mentor. No, these metallic maidens seem intent to conquer the heavy rock universe with full natural teeth aboard, not to be bared in the fascist strutting of a Judas Priest or Saxon, but at the ready for chomp action on the culinary delights available to touring rock stars, ^

“Junk food,” perhaps our most precious natural resource, turns out to be the toothsome Gil’s and Kim’s most vivid impression of the month or so they’ve already spent on the American Road. “Burger King, Pizza Hut, Take-oh Bell,” intones Kim, her eyes getting dreamy, “Pond cakes...” “Ah yes,” I interject, licking my lips, “Sara Lee pound cake...” “Well, that too.” finishes Kim, “I meant pahncakes, you know, with syrup...”

“I’m $160 into my next week’s food allowance already,” boasts Gil, with I-can’tbelieve-I-ate-the-whole-thing guilty pride. “We go on restaurant crawls rather than pub crawls,” quips Kim, as she and Gil excitedly talk up their idea of buying an electric wok tomorrow, so that Gil’s got-aboard-in-S.F boyfriend, who happens to be both an expert masseur and a smashing gourmet cook, can whip up instant delicacies as the Girlschool van tools down America’s freeways. Well, wasn’t it David Lee Roth after all who called metal rock an “eat-or-beeaten” struggle for survival?

I haven’t heard such happy hedonism from a touring rock band for years. And, despite their apparently nonstop intake of roadfood, and of those more traditional metalband potables (hint: Gil’s new fave is Rebel Yell), these Girlschool principals look as fit & trim as the young Keith Richards. Kim McAuliffe pats her taco-engorged turn beneath her long, baggy white sweatshirt, and makes some Girlschool-girltalk crack about the garment’s all-concealing properties, but it’s evident that her trademark black spandex pants are as surgically-implanted as ever. And fresh from an all-day sleep and not yet made up for the stage, Gil Weston looks like a very precocious teenybopper, all big eyes and long loopy legs, and pert breasts beneath her rumpled blue Big Country t-shirt.

Without asking these nice ladies direct questions about their ages, I’m receiving strong impressions that Girlschool are younnng (rhymes with Kerrang!), even in English years. Kim McAuliffe didn’t even attend her first rock concert, an outdoor Slade show, until 1975 (ouch!), and when I utter some inanity about her having missed out on the Beatles years, she takes consolation that her father (double ouch!) was a big Beatles fan.

Girlschool were born in South London as “Painted Lady” in 1977, at the height of punk, and probably coqld have turned “new wave” just as easily as any other rock style. Especially when an early lineup included both founder bassist Enid Williams and lead guitarist Kathy Valentine (in later life bassist for the celebrated Go-Go’s), along with current rhythm guitarist/vocalist Kim McAuliffe. But Valentine had to drop out due to illness, and was replaced by Kelly Johnson, with Denise Dufort joining up as drummer. By 1982, after Painted Lady had evolved into Girlschool and had already made several albums (3 in the U.K., condensed into 2, Hit And Run and Screaming Blue Murder, for U.S. consumption), Enid Williams departed, in favor of Gil Weston.

For the record, Ms. Williams didn’t share her Girlschool mates’ predilection for pieeyed life in the fastfood lane, but in any case, Girlschool’s first post-Williams album, the new P/ay Dirty, sounds much more pop than their earlier records. The four current members of Girlschool seem to have gone through their most rock-impressionable years just at the time of England’s glitterstomp pop boom (T. Rex, Slade, Sweet, Suzi Quatro, etc.) of about 1971-75, so it’s not surprising that they’re starting to spit those ideals of rock back out of their own music now.

"IVe go on restaurant crawls rather than pub crawls” — Kim McAuliffe

P/ay Dirty has plenty of glitter-stomp heritage after all—it was produced by Slade’s prominent boot clompers, Jim (my) Lea and Nod(dy) Holder, who contributed a couple of new songs, “High And Dry” and “Burning In The Heat”—and it includes a cover of Marc Bolan’s “20th Century Boy.” But Girlschool’s own new songs, like “Rock Me Shock Me” and “Breakout” are shrill thumpers very much on the order of Suzi Quatro in her decade-ago heyday, years before she was forced to undergo the weekly indignity of appearing on Happy Days.

Girlschool’s reinvention of their postpunk, post-metal selves as glitterpoppers has provided them a direct route to meeting the idols of their own teen years. Gil and Kim advise me that Suzi Quatro rated P/ay Dirty very highly (as well she might, hearing something so much like her own younger self) on a stars-review-the-records TV show in England. And of course Girlschool got to spend many a brainstorming hour in the studio with their old pub throbs, Messrs. Lea and Holder.

According to Kim, the Sladest lads were disconcerted for a moment when they realized the fully grown Girlschoolers regarded them as elder statesmen of stomp pop, but quickly recovered enough composure to get right down to business. “They wouldn’t let us go to the pub,” Kim pouts. “Jim would block the door,” she demonstrates, her arms spread-eagle against the hotel-room wall, and it hits me that the even more venerable Chas Chandler must’ve done much the same stern-dad routine when he was producing the young & rude Slade in the early ’70s.

However, after a few weeks of intensive work (during which Lea and Holder were overheard speaking in properly-spelled English at all times, e.g., “Come on feel the noise on this track, girls!”) Girlschool were finally allowed to repair to the pub, where, in a monumental round of mug-hoisting with that mug Noddy Holder, “We all ended up under the table!”

Hmm. Girlschool definitely aren’t as morbidly “serious” as so many of the spandau valets coming out of England these days, which may disappoint listeners who expect any all-female band to make some kind of doctrinaire-feminist statement. But Girlschool’s ready looniness also saves them from falling into the overwrought style of preening cock-(envy?)rock their Def Leppard countrymen have made so sickening all over again. In fact, Girlschool’s readiness to laugh (at themselves, or whatever’s handy) sounds like it’ll make their videos of “20th Century Boy” and “Play Dirty” real winners when they finally reach the public. (At this writing they’re still in “light rotation” on MTV, meaning 1 haven’t seen them either.)

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“Ohmthey always ask, ‘Do you get male groupies?’ ” -Kim McAuliffe

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As Gil and Kim relate the plot of the “Play Dirty” video to me, a mom is concerned that her “long-blond-haired-headbanger” son isn’t quite her ideal of masculinity, so she drags him to a gym for a course in boxing. The daft lad’s instruction isn’t taking too well until he happens to notice Girlschool, who are magically enough playing a set next door to the guy, and he proceeds to pick up the proper confidence and aggression from their metal-mama poses. Only—and here’s Girlschool’s redemptive clinker—when they’re supposed to strut and pout and look as dullardly menacing as yer average Def Lep, Girlschool keep giggling and cracking up at the whole absurdity of the conceit.

Which is all as it should be, of course, and which also may explain why Girlschool have their lips clamped so tightly shut in all the P/ay Dirt\; stills—“Hold it two more seconds, girls, and then you can bust your buns laughing at your dopey I-am-Bobby-Plantand-l-am-sensitive-stud poses all you want!”

Speaking of metal poses, Gil Eston excuses herself from the interview at this point to go shower, so she can have nice fresh armpits when she raises her limbs in the various headbanger salutes at Bogart’s tonight. Kim is already looking forward to a day off their tour in Nashville, where Girlschool get to go see their corporate labelmates Kiss in concert, and where Kelly Johnson is scheduled to kiss (lower-case letters) Paul Stanley on stage! Simple pleasures.

In parting, I ask Kim and Gil what kinds of boring queries the other U.S. journalists have been sticking in their faces on this tour. “Oh,” says Kim, “they always ask, ‘What’s it like being in an all-girl band?’ and ‘Do you get male groupies?’, and you haven’t asked either of those questions. We didn’t get to use the smart responses we had all ready for those questions.” Shoot, Kim & Gil, I’m a pro at this after all, two questions I definitely won’t ask Sting when I finally confront him & his neuroses in a motel room someday are 1) “What’s it like being in an all-boy band?” and 2) “Do you get female groupies?”

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Onstage at Bogart’s, Girlschool project a cartoonish version of metallic pop, a la the Ramones or, more exactly, their Slade mentors, that quickly endears them to me. Girlschool’s stack of Marshalls is as portentously erect and as ear-hemorrhaging as any male metaleers’, but Girlschool play with a loose, almost sloppy freneticism that leaves that much more room for raw emotion (as the punks promised) to dominate their music.

Kelly Johnson, the tallest and the blondest of the Girlschoolers, handles lead guitar as the heavy metal law of the jungle dictates, but she alternates lead vocals with punkblack-haired Kim McAuliffe, who turns out to be the owner of the shrill Suzi Quatrolike voice. At first Denise Dufort is virtually hidden behind her double-bass drum kit, from which a steady WHUMP-WHUMP nevertheless invisibly issues, just like the rhythm machines the technopop groups favor. And Gil Weston, her hair in a Minnehaha braid and the slashed fringes on her clothes flying, marches from end to end of the stage in tango with the monstrous bass that looks as big as her body.

Girlschool go through the traditional boogie/metal routines with the audience in a caricature-like fashion. Kim makes genteel fists and waves her arms and does a lot of shrill “Cheers-you-lot!” haranguing of the crowd. And when she and Kelly and Gil line up for that axes-in-synch stage ritual, their guitar-neck choreography is somewhat less precise than say .38 Special’s—but that’s all to the good!

Girlschool were reared as GURLS, and though they’ve succeeded in the male world of heavy metal, their upbringing has also spared them the deadly “preen quotient” that makes their male compatriots so obscene. So Girlschool’s humanizing of metal isn’t (necessarily) liberation, but still it’s not bad. Not to mention that they love junk food. My kinda people.